Here are a few of the points from the course of the day that made me think.

The threat of a new economic crisis

Professor Urs Muller, Managing Director and Chief Economist at BAK Basel Economics, had some worrying thoughts about the state of the global economy:

The good news is that the economic crisis is over. The bad news is that the conditions responsible for the crisis are still intact, and the next crisis is already brewing.

Like various other speakers and panellists, Professor Muller was concerned about the state of regulation of banking activities. As we discussed afterwards: “Who would be a regulator?”

It’s hard to identify and agree which elements of banking need new regulation regimes, and which don’t. However, action by one country alone (for example, by the UK) would fail, since it would merely drive key lines of business elsewhere. Coordination is needed – but hard!

I asked, how much time do we have? Do governments have around ten years to reach agreement and take action, or are things more urgent? Professor Muller replied that if matters were not resolved during 2010, it might already be too late. Unfortunately, the side effect of the current crisis appearing to be over, is that government attention is liable to diminish. Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief, prematurely.

On a more positive note, Professor Muller highlighted the FSB (Financial Stability Board) as a cross-border organisation with a strong potential to address banking system vulnerabilities and to develop and implement strong regulatory, supervisory and other policies in the interest of financial stability. John Kay’s recommendations – in favour of what is called “Narrow banking” – are contained in a 95-page PDF “The Reform of Banking Regulation” available from his website.

Questions posed included why there was no real equivalent, in Europe, to Bill Gates, and which field of technology is likely to prove the most important in the near-term future.

I liked the answer given by Professor Dutta:

The next big wave of hitech innovation is improving the quality of life – including both improving the environment, and improving healthcare.

However, these technologies should not be viewed as alternatives to ICT (Information and Communications Technology). Instead, these technology areas will succeed by implementing the next wave of ICT. But instead of just experiencing “the Internet of websites”, we will see “the Internet of things”.

Alternatives to dependency on growth

Running near the surface of much of the discussion during the day was the theme of growth and sustainability.

A low-carbon economy is only a part of this new economic model we need so badly today. The model that has been around for the past five decades should be replaced. Of course, it cannot be achieved overnight, but I think we can already discuss reference points and general contours of this new model.

It means, above all, the overcoming of the economy’s ‘addiction’ to super-profits and hyper-consumption, which is not possible unless societies reshape their values. It means shifting of the increasingly larger swaths of the economy to production of ‘social goods’, among which the sustainable environment takes a centre stage.

These social goods also include human health in the broad sense of the word, education, culture, equal opportunities, and social unity, including the elimination of the glaring gaps between the rich and the poor.

Society needs all this not only because ethical imperatives dictate it. The economic benefits to be brought by these “goods” are enormous. However, economists are yet to learn how to measure them. An intellectual breakthrough is needed here. A new model of economy can not be built without it.

Energy and sustainability

The #elf09 gathering split up during the afternoon into a series of six parallel discussions. Along with around 40 other people, I took part in a roundtable discussion on “Energy and sustainability”.

It’s true that there is public concern over the prospect of leaks of stored CO2, and over failures in warning systems to detect leaks, but “governments will have to take the lead in public education”.

Timescales to adopt new sources of energy

Mark Williams made the point that, so far, it has taken any new source of energy at least 25 years to achieve 1% of global energy delivery. That point should be kept in mind, to avoid anyone becoming “too optimistic about new energy sources”.

In response, people around the table asked:

Would the equivalent of a war-time situation provide a different kind of reaction from both markets and governments? Do we have to accept that we’ll have the same mindsets as before?

Mark answered:

Don’t underestimate “the tyranny of the installed base”;

Alternative energy sources have to face very significant issues with storage and transport: “electricity is not easily stored”.

I tried a different tack:

Consider the fact that, 25 years ago, there were virtually no mobile phones in use. Over that timescale, enormous infrastructure has been put in place around the planet, and nowadays more than half of the world’s population use mobile phones. Countless technical difficulties were solved en route;

Key to this build-out has been the fact that many companies were prepared to make huge financial investments, anticipating even larger financial paybacks as people use mobile technology;

If energy pricing is set properly (including full consideration for “negative externalities“), won’t companies find sufficient incentives to invest heavily in sustainable energy sources, and develop solutions – roughly similar to what happened for the mobile industry?

As a specific example, what about the prospects for gigantic harvesting of solar energy from a scheme such as Desertec (as described here)?

Mark answered:

The investment needed for new energy sources (at the scale required) dwarfs the investment even of the mobile telephony industry;

New energy sources have too much ground to catch up. For example, every year, China installs as many additional coal-based energy generators as the entire existing UK installed base of such generators.

Around the table, it seemed generally agreed that we do need to prepare for a scenario in which fossil fuels remain in very substantial use over the decades ahead.

The role of green subsidies

Sophia Tickell raised the question of whether government subsidies could make a significant difference to the speed of transition to renewable energy sources. South Korea is perhaps the leading example of where a government green stimulus package is having a significant effect.

Attractive beneficiaries for government subsidies (to recap earlier discussion) would presumably include products for electrical storage and CCS.

On the other hand, it’s possible for governments to pick losers as well as winners, with consequent waste of public funds. Also, government subsidies can in some cases lead to technology failing to develop as efficiently and as innovatively as it ought to. For this reason, it was suggested that “the environmental movement may have oversold the idea of a Green New Deal”.

Discussion continued:

Government should be putting the right framework in place, for market mechanisms to drive the selection and development of desirable products. This includes identifying and allocating the costs of negative externalities, and establishing a proper “level playing field”;

When a desirable momentum is emerging in the marketplace, governments should be getting behind it.

I asked: is it already clear what is this “desirable momentum” that governments should be getting behind? People around the table started listing options. It quickly became a long list. This provoked the following insightful comment from Juan Pablo Crespi, COO Europe of Alkol – to whom I’ll give the final word:

There are too many momentums – but not enough permanentums!

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It is NOT the installed base, nor the money required thats the real problem. It is the governments of the world. While spouting hotair about going green they continue to reap most of their tax revenue from fossil fuels, they are unable to give that up, wean themselves off it, so spend a lot of effort making damned sure that any other ideas are crushed – either with planning permission, deliberate exclusion from finance or legislation.
Electricity is not a difficult energy to store – large scale batteries are, but for large scale storage this is not how its done, I have seen 30 or more years ago ‘stored hydro’ schemes, when there is too much power from wind or solar pump some water up into a lake, when the windor solar is not enough use the hydro to generate.

Let’s recap our options. We can balance fluctuating demand and fluctuating supply by switching on and off power generators (waste incinerators and hydroelectric stations, for example); by storing energy somewhere and regenerating it when it’s needed; or by switching demand off and on.

The most promising of these options, in terms of scale, is switching on and off the power demand of electric-vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of associated batteries each (some of which might be ex-changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then the total storage capacity would be bigger still.

There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind fluctuations. If my prediction about hydrogen vehicles is wrong, and hydrogen vehicles turn out to be the low-energy vehicles of the future, then the wind-with-electric-vehicles match-up that I’ve just described could of course be replaced by a wind-with-hydrogen match-up. The wind turbines would make electricity; and whenever electricity was plentiful, hydrogen would be produced and stored in tanks, for subsequent use in vehicles or in other applications, such as glass production…

There are a few other demand-management and energy-storage options, which we’ll survey now…

With respect to world financial crisis and the fact that regulations are still in place which permitted the crisis to happen: I think developed countries must differentiate between risky and safe investments and then limit risky investments to those made directly by a fund or individual and excluding retirement funds such as pensions. If an individual wants risky investment they should be required to get ouside the safer confines of group retirement plans. Financial institutions participating in risky investments should not be allowed to participate in pensions and other retirement funds. If retirement money dries up to risky practices, then many businesses will quit participating in risky ventures such as hedge funds and derivatives!